Bakudeku/Dekubaku Oneshots AU

Together in Death

“Do you remember this day?”

The photo crinkles as Mitsuki hands it to her with hands that are far more steady than her own when she takes it. It’s an old photo, from the very beginning of the album and even with the soft brown fade that tells her how much time passed— Inko will always recognise that day.

They are young (still had been so young), Katsuki and her Izuku posed in front of their high school with their certificates in hand and hero uniforms sitting natural across their shoulders, buffed and cleaned and shining.

They look like heroes, strong and wild and the joy in Izuku’s gaze is infectious even now.

She remembers the frantic video call at eight o’clock the night before, Izuku agonising over how to remove a stain he hadn’t seen and just knew she would be able to help. (Inko had become proficient in removing blood from clothing since Izuku was in middle school after all)

It will always be a soft, cherished thought for her— helping Izuku buff out the scratches she had never been brave enough to ask the origin of and the love on his face when he thanks her. He doesn’t say it all— but Inko knows he’s thanking her for far more than helping him with his uniform.

It aches, a little, to see the forest green of Izuku’s uniform now, knowing that the last one he had touched is more rust-red than green, is torn to pieces—

Inko clenches the photo in her hand, fingernails digging into her palms and feels her eyes burn.

She wonders why nobody tells parents that they will lose their children twice when they become heroes.

Inko loses Izuku the day he dons the uniform for his first official patrol, when she watches him tighten the straps of Katsuki’s bracers even though his partner can do them himself. When the green swallows up his shoulders, Katsuki crouches at his side to secure the zipper. Their hands linger in a way that is intimate, not in a way that requires privacy but in the unthinking, blind way that they love each other with no words. They lose their sons the first time there in her living room, with the morning grey and cool outside their door.

“I remember that day, they were-“ there’s a laugh building up in her chest, except it doesn’t feel like mirth. It feels like drowning slowly, insipid moisture that will hold her in a stranglehold for the rest of her days. 

Mitsuki’s laugh is the same, if sadder over time. “We found those two idiots in the hallway, remember, fooling around! I’d never seen Katsuki that flustered in my life!”

Inko feels the water fall a little in her lungs and laughs, with a smile on the exhale. “They thought we didn’t know-“ she pauses as she laughs again, lost in the memory of red faces and stammering and the way Izuku had looked at Katsuki in that quiet moment, like the blond had been everything. “Like we could’ve missed it! Do you remember that time at his birthday dinner—“

Mitsuki snorts into her teacup next to her, a wide grin stretched over her face as she lowers the cup. “Oh that time they got ‘stuck’ in the laundry cupboard and ‘it was cramped old hag, of fucking course we’re red and hot’? Like we couldn’t see the damn hickies-“ Mitsuki cuts off as a chuckle erupts from her mouth, and Inko cannot help but join in.

“They always were like that, weren’t they?” She muses, once they’ve calmed a little, staring down at the picture in her hand. She’s bent it a little, so she smoothes it down against the table top, working out the light creases she had unwittingly added. “Always so close, even after all that went on. Makes me wonder, I guess…”

Mitsuki glances at her over the edge of her cup with tired red eyes. “Wonder what?”

Tracing the face of her only child, and the softness of the joy in his eyes, the soft grip of another arms snug around his shoulders. “I wonder how long they knew that this would be how it ended.”

They fall into the same empty, tiny silence that dominates their lives now, staring at a photograph with emotions too bitter to name.

“I think we should add that one to the service.” Mitsuki offers a hum in reply, gazing into another album.

With fingers that tremble, Inko carefully places the wrinkled photograph on a small pile in the centre of the table. Her hands brush carefully along egg-shell white paper, crisp and fresh from the printers that very day.

The face of her son, alongside the face of his husband stares up at her from the funeral program.

Inko wants to know why she had to lose her son twice.

She loses him to heroics, to a school that promised to keep him safe. A school that instead took and took and took until all Inko had left was a hero-shaped mould of her son, her sweet child a force of nature but irrevocably changed. She loses him in the soft moments between two boys who had been through too much to name, when she catches flashes of footage on the news of the Twin Stars, glorious in victory and surrounded by chaos. Loses Izuku to the tranquil love he finds in Katsuki, crouched together in the aftermath of battles that terrify her.

Inko loses her son in the same way, to something that terrifies her. She wakes for work, avoiding the television as she always does. She doesn’t like the morning news, cannot help the anxiety that pulls at her chest when she watches it and hopes she doesn’t see her son.

He’s the number one hero, so it’s always given she does. 

That morning is different, when Mitsuki’s tearful voice tells her to turn on her television and Inko feels her stomach drop. She does and the world as Inko knows it ends that day.

“They died together,” Aizawa tells her later. He’s older now, retired from the streets but he’s taken over an entire police department in the wake of his career-ending injury more than a decade ago. He’s silver-haired, face darker with lines— he doesn’t cry when he visits her, sitting in the lounge room where one of his most successful students once sat and loved and grew up in.

“They died together,” he tells her again. Tells her that Izuku hadn’t gone alone, tells her that Katsuki drew him into his arms at the end and that they died as they had lived: together.

Inko tells him, in the surest voice she can manage, that her son had died years ago.

Aizawa Shouta grips the bracelet his son had given him, the week before they found him dead in a ditch. And when Inko cries into the tablecloth of the dining table, Aizawa cannot help but agree when she mutters, dark and low—

“They never tell us we lose them twice.”

END